Why did Western civilization become more advanced?

[abradley]

Those are moral judgments on complex processes. At the time,for the situation, the choices individuals in history made made sense to them. Saying the East made stupid decisions ignores the fact that some of those stupid decisions were only stupid in hindsight, using a particular metric. And it ignores the fact that if not for factors outside of their control those decisions could have become good decisions by that same metric.

Firmly believe in 'KISS'.

Stupid in hindsight is still stupid.

 

[abradley]

The next step (really the first step) is to ask yourself if your assumption is a valid one to make, and why it is an assumption for you.

A good example: a Modernist might say "the Roman Empire collapsed because x, y, and z" - a Postmodernist would instead say "Did the Roman empire even collapse in the first place?"

To apply it to this position: you are saying "The West succeeded because x, y, and z, while the East failed because t, u, and v" I am saying "Is it even justified to describe "The West" and "The East" in such monolithic, personified terms?"

Since Hygro explained it, You and I have no point of reference.

Hygro may have created a MONSTER.

 

[Hygro]

Again, thank you.

As for what's my next step, I'll stay as I am

No problem and at some point, the best contribution is to stick to what you've practiced. You might enjoy the stimulation of questioning it all.

The next step (really the first step) is to ask yourself if your assumption is a valid one to make, and why it is an assumption for you.

A good example: a Modernist might say "the Roman Empire collapsed because x, y, and z" - a Postmodernist would instead say "Did the Roman empire even collapse in the first place?"

To apply it to this position: you are saying "The West succeeded because x, y, and z, while the East failed because t, u, and v" I am saying "Is it even justified to describe "The West" and "The East" in such monolithic, personified terms?"

Yeah this is good.

Firmly believe in 'KISS'.

Stupid in hindsight is still stupid.

haha I do too, but what's more simple:
There is a coalition called West that did X, and there is a hive-mind named Islam that did Y! Therefore the West wins!
or
People did stuff, here we are.

While the postmodernist has infinite relativity, the modernist has infinite self justification. The west wins because the west decided what metric it wants to define as "winning" and then declares itself the winner. Go team?

Since Hygro explained it, You and I have no point of reference.

Hygro may have created a MONSTER.

well with so much modern media and people explaining it, you can make the leap if you want

in my story of my dad, he just doesn't want to because he felt he paid his dues in questioning the status quo exploring the meaning of things.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Both the modernist and the postmodernist perspectives as elaborated on in this thread seem completely unappealing to me.

 

[Hygro]

Both the modernist and the postmodernist perspectives as elaborated on in this thread seem completely unappealing to me.

Yeah they both suck. What is the escape?

 

[jackelgull]

Firmly believe in 'KISS'.

Stupid in hindsight is still stupid.

Not always.

For example, let's say a football team has one really good running back, and are six points down, in the final quarter, final down, and in the Superbowl. To everyone's surprise, the ball is thrown to a second rate running back, who seems as surprised as anybody, makes it five yards, and gets sacked. Everybody is pissed, and calls the team stupid for not giving it to their one good running back. However, everybody and their mother was expecting that at game time. The other team had heavy defenses around that running back. Had the other guy been quicker on his feet he might have made it. Was that team's plan still stupid in hindsight.


Another thing to consider is that terms like "The West" and "The East" imply a closer relationship between the subgroups that appear under the umbrella then there really were. In "the Muslim world" during the Crusades, some Muslim nations aided the Crusaders. Why? Because they hated other Muslim nations more. They would object to being thrown under the same label. The reason people use those terms is because it is convenient.

 

[Tahuti]

Yeah they both suck. What is the escape?

Eh... metamodernity?

 

[Plotinus]

thanks. I have this problem with my dad, as I will reiterate.


I respect the straightforward attempt but how to get past the filter? People will only devote X amount of energy and brain power, and if it's contradicting what they hold to be true, especially self-evident, they will dismiss it. Whatever you say has to penetrate that filter. I don't know how to penetrate a modernist's filter. You have to understand that you and I and Owen literally think in a different way.

My dad was born and educated in the east coast mid century, my mom a few years later on the west coast. My mom is a postmodernist, my dad is a modernist. My dad had all the forward thinking exposure possible, (artists, was a hippie) including a wife whose opinions he respects.

But after all these years he's still a modernist. He literally cannot think like a post-modernist. He can entertain a post modern thought, but he has no underlying intellectual structure to reinforce it and let it compare to everything else. In the end, it becomes mental clutter, so either he holds onto it like a rusting car in the front yard or he discards it.

Ideas like "grammar is arbitrary" rather than there being a "correct grammar" offend him. He thinks I'm quaint and childish when I demonstrate this but really it just scares him. And he just blurp blurp blurp shutdown-reboots.

In fact, the best thing to help him get it has been to explain that he is a modernist and his children aren't, what that means, and why.

abradley and Owen are talking skew lines. Owen is saying "the very concepts you are using are not valid unless you can define their precise meanings and then demonstrate why they are valid concepts". abradley tries to demonstrate more evidence that his thesis is correct, assuming that his concepts are already validated. It would be like the following:

abradley: one cannot say "I be the best, you must say I am the best" because that is wrong grammar.
Owen: the only rules of language are: do people understand as intended?
abradley: here, I have proof. Check out this Official Book of Language!
Owen: that book is as arbitrary as making Jamaican street English the standard.
abradley: look how all these experts throughout history agree with me.
Owen: those experts are making the same mistake you are.

What can you do? abradley thinks he hasn't shown Owen enough evidence to demonstrate his thesis. Owen, like the rest of us, has no idea what magic words he needs to inform abradley that the victors write history and make the rules and that doesn't make it correct, it just means that it happened that way. That all cultural phenomena are arbitrary and can only be judged according to arbitrary values most likely instilled into you by your own arbitrary culture.

The problem here is that you're doing exactly what you characterise abradley as doing. You haven't offered any reasons to think that what you call "postmodernism" is actually correct, or closer to the truth than what you call "modernism". All you've done is try to define it more clearly or to assert its claims.

I would say that the notion that you have to be able to define a concept perfectly accurately before you're allowed to use it is precisely the error that Socrates typically makes in most of Plato's dialogues. It's an error because language doesn't work that way. Can you define "the west" or "scientific advances" perfectly accurately? Of course not, but that doesn't mean you can't use them. You can't define any of the words we're using on this board with perfect accuracy but we can still use them, and that is partly because in real life we use a sort of automatic principle of charitable interpretation which helps us guess roughly what the other person is trying to say. Meanings are fuzzy but they still work. It surprises me that it's the people who claim to understand how language really works, and who claim not to be bound to arbitrary rules of grammar, who seem not to understand this, and who make impossible demands of their interlocutors like "define every word you're using or I'll pretend not to understand what you're saying". That's an A-Level philosophy student debating society way of proceeding, not a real-life way of proceeding.

In short, this isn't postmodernism. It's a sort of error-theory modernism. You're really modernists, because you hold modernist standards for how language should be used - you just think that it never matches those standards. A real postmodernist wouldn't have these standards in the first place.

 

[Hygro]

It's funny because that thought, that I just demonstrated a modernist version of celebrating postmodernity, was nagging me earlier, but decided for my sanity not to head down that path.

I'm not sure how you came to a conclusion of how I think language should be. I'm not sure what standards you're even talking about.

Eh... metamodernity?

post-irony?

 

[Flying Pig]

The problem here is that you're doing exactly what you characterise abradley as doing. You haven't offered any reasons to think that what you call "postmodernism" is actually correct, or closer to the truth than what you call "modernism". All you've done is try to define it more clearly or to assert its claims.

I would say that the notion that you have to be able to define a concept perfectly accurately before you're allowed to use it is precisely the error that Socrates typically makes in most of Plato's dialogues. It's an error because language doesn't work that way. Can you define "the west" or "scientific advances" perfectly accurately? Of course not, but that doesn't mean you can't use them. You can't define any of the words we're using on this board with perfect accuracy but we can still use them, and that is partly because in real life we use a sort of automatic principle of charitable interpretation which helps us guess roughly what the other person is trying to say. Meanings are fuzzy but they still work. It surprises me that it's the people who claim to understand how language really works, and who claim not to be bound to arbitrary rules of grammar, who seem not to understand this, and who make impossible demands of their interlocutors like "define every word you're using or I'll pretend not to understand what you're saying". That's an A-Level philosophy student debating society way of proceeding, not a real-life way of proceeding.

In short, this isn't postmodernism. It's a sort of error-theory modernism. You're really modernists, because you hold modernist standards for how language should be used - you just think that it never matches those standards. A real postmodernist wouldn't have these standards in the first place.

I think there is room for more valid and less valid uses of language, though - nobody will tell you that all definitions of 'the West' are equally valid. Similarly, fuzzy definitions may work most of the time, but not when two people have ideas about them which don't line up. It's fair enough to say 'come up with a definition of 'the West' and tell me why it's valid, and then we'll go on', as long as you're not saying 'there is only one valid definition of 'the West': find it for me before we continue', I think. Or am I still being too Modernist?

 

[abradley]

I feel this situation is near silly.

The title of the thread is "Why did Western civilization become more advanced?" and am asked 'What do you mean by West?'

The Video by Alan Macfarlane (A noted historian) posted earlier is titled 'Reliable Knowledge of the World: Reflections on the 'Great Divergence' of East and West'.

He didn't to have explain what he meant by 'East' and 'West' before he continued with the lecture.

Have to agree with:

Lone Wolf sez: Both the modernist and the postmodernist perspectives as elaborated on in this thread seem completely unappealing to me.

 

[jackelgull]

First of all, I want to apologize if I've ever come off across as conceited or arrogant. I don't think I've found the "answers". I just believe there are no absolute answers. Humans create arbitrary answers that work for us and go from there.

Now,I'm nowhere as articulate or smart as Hygro or Owen,but I'll try to succinctly bring up my views.The problem I have with your claim of Western development is that your argument essentially treats history like a game of Civilization. The East and the West are entities consciously aware of an "endgame". There's a tech goal they know they should reach, and the East failed to reach that goal as quickly as the West which snowballed into a runaway Civ. In short, you are assigning motives to two entities that don't exist. For most of history, scientific discoveries were just individuals solving problems, and thinking with their heads. They were not conscious decisions by the "East" or the "West" to advance to the next stage in the game. There was never a game. There's just people trying to live life.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Both 'East' and 'West' are non-nonsensical concepts in any case. The Islamic world has more in common with western Europe than China. The 'West' is just a concept that Americans and a few select allies like England and France like to use to group themselves and whatever predecessors they've cheerypicked together, meaning that the 'East' is just a meaningless grouping of everyone else in Eurasia, a grouping which can include anyone from Poles, Greeks and Russians to Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Iranians and Malays depending on era and politics. I could probably be designated an 'Easterner' for writing this post!

 

[Plotinus]

I'm not sure how you came to a conclusion of how I think language should be. I'm not sure what standards you're even talking about.

I was thinking more of the view you attribute to Owen than anything you've said in your own voice, as it were. The standard in question is the insistence that a word must be clearly defined before its use is "valid". Whatever that means...

I think there is room for more valid and less valid uses of language, though - nobody will tell you that all definitions of 'the West' are equally valid. Similarly, fuzzy definitions may work most of the time, but not when two people have ideas about them which don't line up. It's fair enough to say 'come up with a definition of 'the West' and tell me why it's valid, and then we'll go on', as long as you're not saying 'there is only one valid definition of 'the West': find it for me before we continue', I think. Or am I still being too Modernist?

Sure, "the West" is vague, and it's reasonable to ask someone what they mean by it. But it's not reasonable to press that to extremes by asserting that the term is intrinsically meaningless or arbitrary no matter what that person says.

If I wanted to play the "define that first" game I'd say that you and everyone else are using the word "valid" an awful lot without saying what it means, and I find this puzzling because to me, validity is a property of arguments, not of words or concepts. But I'm not pressing this point, partly because I try not to be that annoying, and partly because I have a fairly good idea of roughly what you all mean by it despite this inaccuracy of speech. And that's how language works. Similarly, I think we all know roughly what both the OP and abradley mean by "the West", and turning the entire thread into an argument about whether anyone's allowed to use that term or indeed any other seems to me to be rather missing the point.

Now,I'm nowhere as articulate or smart as Hygro or Owen,but I'll try to succinctly bring up my views.The problem I have with your claim of Western development is that your argument essentially treats history like a game of Civilization. The East and the West are entities consciously aware of an "endgame". There's a tech goal they know they should reach, and the East failed to reach that goal as quickly as the West which snowballed into a runaway Civ. In short, you are assigning motives to two entities that don't exist. For most of history, scientific discoveries were just individuals solving problems, and thinking with their heads. They were not conscious decisions by the "East" or the "West" to advance to the next stage in the game. There was never a game. There's just people trying to live life.

I agree with your basic position here but I think you're being unfair to abradley and the OP. To ask why one culture is more technologically advanced than another is not to assume that one wants to be, planned to be, or is even aware of being, more advanced. It's not even to assume that the cultures in question have any concept of technological advance, or any notion of being distinct cultures at all. It assumes only that we can distinguish between them and have some criteria by which to compare them.

For example, it's perfectly reasonable to ask why Matteo Ricci could impress the Chinese with his clockwork devices when they had nothing comparable to show to him - this does not assume that anyone at the time thought they were in some kind of race to unlock the clockwork tech tree. It's also reasonable to ask why Oxford, and not Timbuktu, became a centre of astronomy and chemistry in the seventeenth century; why the Portuguese were in a position to help the Ethiopians against Adal rather than require help from them; why the British had the Maxim Gun and the Matabele did not; and so on. Such questions, in themselves, make no assumptions about the beliefs and attitudes of the people they're about. And to ask such questions is not to assume that the answers to them will be simple or even the same in each case.

 

[jackelgull]

I agree with your basic position here but I think you're being unfair to abradley and the OP. To ask why one culture is more technologically advanced than another is not to assume that one wants to be, planned to be, or is even aware of being, more advanced. It's not even to assume that the cultures in question have any concept of technological advance, or any notion of being distinct cultures at all. It assumes only that we can distinguish between them and have some criteria by which to compare them.

For example, it's perfectly reasonable to ask why Matteo Ricci could impress the Chinese with his clockwork devices when they had nothing comparable to show to him - this does not assume that anyone at the time thought they were in some kind of race to unlock the clockwork tech tree. It's also reasonable to ask why Oxford, and not Timbuktu, became a centre of astronomy and chemistry in the seventeenth century; why the Portuguese were in a position to help the Ethiopians against Adal rather than require help from them; why the British had the Maxim Gun and the Matabele did not; and so on. Such questions, in themselves, make no assumptions about the beliefs and attitudes of the people they're about. And to ask such questions is not to assume that the answers to them will be simple or even the same in each case.

Indeed, it is a perfectly valid question to ask why certain cultures are more technologically advanced than others. However, I'm not sure if the question asked is really as objective as that. The following quote by abradley is why I suspect he's thinking of scientific advancement between east and west in terms of an endgame.

Again, thank you.

As for what's my next step, I'll stay as I am, it explains to me 'why we westerners ruled the roost for the last few centuries, but the Easterners are the smartest kids on the block in the USA.

What is that answer O'Wise One?

It's the East acted stupidly at crucial points, and the big plus, the Judaeo-Christian culture.

Saying that the East acted stupidly implies that the East was the noob that didn't cottage his capital by 2000 BC.

 

[Flying Pig]

Sure, "the West" is vague, and it's reasonable to ask someone what they mean by it. But it's not reasonable to press that to extremes by asserting that the term is intrinsically meaningless or arbitrary no matter what that person says.

If I wanted to play the "define that first" game I'd say that you and everyone else are using the word "valid" an awful lot without saying what it means, and I find this puzzling because to me, validity is a property of arguments, not of words or concepts. But I'm not pressing this point, partly because I try not to be that annoying, and partly because I have a fairly good idea of roughly what you all mean by it despite this inaccuracy of speech. And that's how language works. Similarly, I think we all know roughly what both the OP and abradley mean by "the West", and turning the entire thread into an argument about whether anyone's allowed to use that term or indeed any other seems to me to be rather missing the point.

It may be a fair argument that abradley is using a definition of 'the West' which is equivalent to 'the part of the world that we currently think of as the most advanced/generally the best'.

 

[Cutlass]

I am so not an intellectual.....

 

[jackelgull]

Neither am I.

 

[abradley]

First of all, I want to apologize if I've ever come off across as conceited or arrogant. I don't think I've found the "answers". I just believe there are no absolute answers. Humans create arbitrary answers that work for us and go from there.

Now,I'm nowhere as articulate or smart as Hygro or Owen,but I'll try to succinctly bring up my views.The problem I have with your claim of Western development is that your argument essentially treats history like a game of Civilization. The East and the West are entities consciously aware of an "endgame". There's a tech goal they know they should reach, and the East failed to reach that goal as quickly as the West which snowballed into a runaway Civ. In short, you are assigning motives to two entities that don't exist. For most of history, scientific discoveries were just individuals solving problems, and thinking with their heads. They were not conscious decisions by the "East" or the "West" to advance to the next stage in the game. There was never a game. There's just people trying to live life.

No need to apologize, IMHO we're all trying to answer the question posed by the title, some say it's a nonsense question, I say it's an important question.

Why important, because Civs are like humans and as they grow they make mistakes, I fell it's wise to pay attention to the mistakes and hopefully not repeat.

In no way do I feel we westerners are superior racially or as individuals, as Owen pointed out earlier, we've had a lot of luck, just take geography, China had a well watered plain and united early on with a strong central government, Europe was divided by mountains and rivers, it developed many cultures that were constantly competing/warring (like early Greece). The rivers were a blessing, cheap transport plus cultural intermixing, as Braudel points sub-Saharan Africa has no navigational rivers like the North African Nile, IIRC he felt this stunted their growth. Makes sense to me.

As Stark points out nothing great came out of unified Greece or the Roman Empire, his point being you need competition to stimulate thought. (My interpetion)

So, back to the subject, a military cadet needs to know the blunders/brilliant moves in earlier battles, Doctors study other doctor's work and results,

IMO history is the same.

Best to all

 

[abradley]

I am so not an intellectual.....

Neither am I, as is obvious.

Addon

jackelgull beat me too it. But in my case it's a pure truth.